Mark Shuttleworth: "I simply have zero interest in the crowd who wants to be different. Leet. 'Linux is supposed to be hard so it's exclusive' is just the dumbest thing that a smart person could say." He's right. Lots of interesting insights in this blog post - I may not agree with everything Ubuntu does, but at least it's doing something.

It is the job of a distribution to create something cohesive out of the many projects which pertain to a given product. What you do not understand, it seems, is that Microsoft and Apple aren't all working together within their company either. They are also working on utterly unrelated parts of the system individually with a particular goal in mind.

What Ubuntu is doing is awesome, truly. With Juju and MAAS, the diverse projects targeting the cloud become irrelevant almost, you just concentrate on your particular mission. The strategy is the same in the desktop space, they are creating a great experience for utilizing the applications available. Make no mistake, for a developer, there really is no difference between Linux distributions until it comes time to compile and package their software. Only then do they have to worry about a particular systems library versions and package management. It is why you only ever see one tar.gz on a given projects site, the Linux system is quite cohesive if you know what you want to target, it is just complicated because there are many choices. Again, though, Canonical is addressing this, trying to help developers who are confused by those choices to make good decisions.

Linux is a kernel, it has never been related to desktops really. There are other components which generally target that kernel and a particular set of libraries. Unlike in the Windows world, you won't see software overwriting those libraries though, they can contribute directly to the libraries upstream. In this way everything on the system is cohesive and well defined, but to understand the whole system is complicated. This is why distributions exist, and Ubuntu does a better job than anyone else at bring that all together and delivering it in a meaningful way.